Phantom of Riverside Park
Read Phantom of Riverside Park Online
Authors: Peggy Webb
Tags: #womens fiction, #literary fiction, #clean read, #wounded hero, #war heroes, #southern authors, #smalltown romance
PHANTOM OF RIVERSIDE PARK
Peggy Webb
Phantom of Riverside Park
All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction.
The events described are imaginary, and the characters are
fictitious and not intended to represent specific living
persons.
ISBN 978-0-9899555-9-1
Copyright 2014 by Peggy Webb
Cover design copyright 2014 by Vicki Hinze
Canstockphoto.com (Manipulated)
Excerpt for use in any review, the reproduction or
utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any
electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden, without
the written permission of the publisher.
Published in the United States of America
Smashwords Edition
AUTHOR
“Lovely, flowing prose…a nuanced character
study.”
Booklist
“Wonderful style of storytelling…an
unforgettable book.”
Fresh Fiction
“Webb captures charm and grace…sure to
delight.”
The Times Record News
“Webb has penned a memorable story, not to be
missed.”
Wordweavers
On
The Sweetest Hallelujah
by Elaine
Hussey (pen name for Peggy Webb)
“Hussey has written a lovely, poetic book
about race, love, mothers, daughters
and friends that navigates a spectrum of
emotional minefields.”
Kirkus Review
On
The Tender Mercy of Roses
by
Peggy Webb writing as Anna Michaels
“An unforgettable story told with astonishing
skill and clarity by a truly gifted writer.”
NY Times
bestselling author PAT
CONROY
“A thrilling page-turner…a treasure!”
CASSANDRA KING, author of
The Same Sweet
Girls
“Enchanting …magical moments of insight that
took my breath away!”
NY
Times
bestselling author MARY
ALICE MONROE
“A magical story…lyrical and powerful.”
NY
Times
bestselling author, PATTI
CALLAHAN HENRY
“A story so moving and lyrically written it
sometimes seems like a dream.”
Delta Magazine
Book
One:
“The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” William
Faulkner
Book
Two:
“And so we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, from
The Great Gatsby
Book
Three:
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
William Shakespeare from
The Tempest
“The past is not dead; it’s not even
past.”
William Faulkner
“The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of
The Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”
David Cohn, l935
When you live in the middle of your own
tragedy you get so used to the daily terror that you can sail
unharmed past the boulders that drop into your path at every turn.
It’s the pebbles that make you trip and fall.
Elizabeth Jennings’ pebble was a pack of
peanuts that wouldn’t open. She’d waited all day for them, standing
on her feet in Celine’s Bakery where she worked, smelling the sugar
and the hot oil used to fry the doughnuts and humming “Amazing
Grace” every now and then to cover the sound of her rumbling
stomach.
By the grace of God and some tough genes
passed on to her from Papa and Mae Mae, the grandparents who
practically raised her, she survived till the clock on the wall
chimed five and she was free at last.
She put her money in the machine then
snatched her peanuts and dropped them into her purse. She wasn’t
about to eat them in front of Celine, the Simon Legree of bosses.
Show the least bit of weakness and some people will run all over
you. Celine was one of those.
When Elizabeth had first started working at
the bakery, she’d asked Celine about taking some of the day-old
doughnuts home to her son and her grandfather. Her boss had yelled
at her as if she’d suggested something obscene.
“What do you think I’m running here? A
charity? I take the culls home to Mama.”
Looking at the huge pile of culls, Elizabeth
had pictured an elephantine woman sucking up sugar like a vacuum
cleaner. Celine obviously ate her share, too. Her mean little eyes
made Elizabeth think of raisins set in a glob of yeast-rising
dough.
“You want doughnuts,” her boss had screamed,
“you pay for doughnuts, Lizzie.”
Right then and there Elizabeth swore to
herself she would walk a mile on razor blades before she’d ever buy
a doughnut from Celine Delinsky. Furthermore, she wasn’t fixing to
cow down to her, even if it meant losing her job before she ever
got started good.
“My name is not Lizzie. It’s Elizabeth. Like
the queen.” She picked up her purse and headed toward the door.
“Where do you think you’re going? You’ve got
work to do.”
Elizabeth stood at the door with her back to
Celine, stiff-necked and proud. The silence that stretched between
them was so deep and wide, you could drive a truck through it. With
her hand on the door Elizabeth thought of herself traipsing the
streets looking for another job. She thought of her grandfather and
her son depending on her.
Lord, what had she done now and when was she
ever going to learn? Torn between swallowing her pride or walking
out the door, she heard Celine clear her throat.
“Ahhh... Elizabeth, I’ll let you put your
purse in my office. There’s no telling what all kind of riff raff
will be coming in here today. A body can’t be too careful.”
Elizabeth accepted the grudging concession,
and in the three and a half years she’d worked there it was the
only one Celine had ever made. They worked together in a state of
uneasy truce. When Elizabeth got hungry she bought peanuts, and
when she wanted doughnuts she walked to Levitt’s Bakery, six blocks
out of her way.
“You’re stubborn as that old mule I used to
keep,” Papa would sometimes tell her, and Elizabeth guessed it was
true.
Otherwise why did she walk three blocks
before she ever opened her peanuts, her stomach growling every step
of the way?
She wanted to make sure Celine didn’t see,
that’s why. The crowd jostled around her as Elizabeth pulled at the
corner that said
open here.
The cellophane didn’t budge.
Not the slightest tear. She tried using her teeth. No luck. She
tried poking a hole with her fingernails.
Elizabeth who was normally a soft-spoken,
easy-going woman wanted to throw the bag on the sidewalk and stomp
it, screaming. Instead she gouged it with her car keys. All of a
sudden the bag split and peanuts flew every which way. Pigeons
swooped out of trees and off the roofs of tall buildings. Swarms of
them. Greedy, nasty birds feasting on her lunch/supper.
The peanuts magnified in significance,
metamorphosed into dreams spent and wasted, and all of a sudden
Elizabeth’s whole history swam past her in the heat waves that rose
up from the sidewalk. She crumpled onto the stoop of the Lassiter
Building and cried, great gulping sobs that provided the soundtrack
for the movie playing through her head.
She saw herself hiding under the bed while
her mother Judith railed about Elizabeth’s shortcomings and her
father Manny sat on a handmade kitchen chair with his head bowed.
In Judith’s tirade, Manny Jennings’ own transgressions got mixed up
with his daughter’s, and his infamous ancestor Major Hiram Jennings
thundered through in disgrace. The walls shook as Judith built to
her finale where she put her dead hero Gladys Presley, mother of
the famous icon, on a pedestal that Judith, herself, would have
joined if she hadn’t given birth to a daughter whose lineage doomed
her to failure.
Elizabeth will never amount to a hill of
beans.
That had been Judith’s oft-expressed
prediction, and Elizabeth had made it come true.
Tears burned her cheeks and people on the
street stopped to stare, but Elizabeth was only vaguely aware of
them. She saw herself pregnant and scared, exiled from school,
exiled from her father’s house. She saw her flight from the Delta
in an old pickup truck with Papa at the wheel acting as if they
were embarking on a grand adventure instead of leaving her hometown
in disgrace.
“Can I help you, young woman?”
The man bending over her was wearing some
sort of red uniform and his skin was the color of old parchment.
His kindness made Elizabeth cry even harder.
“Let me get you inside. I’ll get you
something cool to drink. This heat is enough to upset anybody.” He
fluttered to a stop, a large and benevolent bird out of his
element.
“No, thank you. I have to go.”
“You shouldn’t be walking about all upset
like that. Let me call you a cab.”
She had fourteen dollars and forty-five cents
in her pocket, and she had to stretch it over six days and three
people. He might as well have suggested a ride to the moon.
“No, really. Thank you, but no. It’s just up
the street. It’s the...the Peabody. They’re expecting me.”
Elizabeth left the old man standing on the
sidewalk like some molting, skinny-legged red bird.
What if she just kept on going? What if she
went clear out of Memphis and hitchhiked across the Arkansas Bridge
with a trucker who was headed south all the way to the border of
Mexico? Elizabeth could cross over and call herself Chiquita like
the banana and find a job in a nice cantina where she would earn
enough money to live like a queen. All by herself. She could loll
on the beach when she wanted to. She’d read good books. She’d learn
to sip margaritas.
Across the street was Riverside Park where
her grandfather and her child waited for her, Papa with his hope he
carried around like a battered battle flag and Nicky with his
disfigured lip that made him the brunt of bullies. Just last week
they’d surrounded him at the park, calling him
fat lips
till Nicky burst into tears and Papa chased them off with his
walking cane.
“It’s not your fault,” Papa had told her when
Nicky was born. “I’m gonna take care of you and the baby.”
“Who will take care of you, Papa?”
“God.”
Elizabeth supposed He did, with a little help
from her. She worked two jobs, and ought to be grateful to get
them.
Today, though, she was all out of gratitude
and courage and a stiff upper lip. She couldn’t bear to pick up her
little family at the park and take them to a house sinking down on
itself in a neighborhood where drug dealing was more common than
sandlot basketball.
“I am running away.”
She said this aloud, and a man with two
snooty-looking poodles jerked the leashes to remove his dogs from
her path. As if she were crazy. As if she were a woman who had lost
her marbles and didn’t know where to find them.
